Why are Mac generated pdfs so huge?

It may be your settings. Since there are no graphics, then there's no reason not to squeeze the file down as much as possible. Just to make sure we were comparing similar items, I took a text only Word document and kept pasting all 20 pages of text back into it until the file was just a bit over 500 KB.

Saving the file as a PDF using OS X's built in PDF function produced an 864 KB file. Through Acrobat Pro 9's Distiller, using the option for "Smallest File Size", it produced a PDF file of 432 KB. That without embedding any fonts with Acrobat. Which is most likely the main difference in the sizes. OS X automatically embeds fonts, Acrobat must be told to do so.

What I don't know is exactly how OS X embeds fonts. That is, whether they are a subset of the fonts used, or entire sets. The drawback though of leaving fonts out of the document is the likelihood that the PDF file will not display correctly on any system that does not have the same fonts active you used when creating your file.

I made a new document and saved it as a straight text document to remove all formatting. Then opened it again and assigned Comic Sans MS to the whole thing. Made one paragraph Arial Bold and another Trebuchet MS Bold Italic. Then copy/pasted the entire body text until a .doc file was 500 KB.

OS X made a 548 KB PDF file. Acrobat with no fonts embedded came out to 540 KB. I then made one PDF file with full font sets embedded and another using subsets with Acrobat. Both came out to 2.8 MB.

This was a very simple document using nothing more than letters A-Z and a-z with the usual punctuation marks. Digging a little in Acrobat Pro, it shows that the fonts were not embedded just once, but for every instance of a break in style. Since I copy/pasted the same text about 40 times, it embedded the same fonts over and over.

Hard to believe that OS X would be smarter than Acrobat Pro's Distiller and embed used fonts only once, but that sure seems to be the case.

Does a program exist that can consolidate fonts in pdf files? It doesn't seem Acrobat Pro can do it.

Not sure, but then, I haven't looked into it. This also may simply be an ugly bug in version 9. I don't recall version 8 having this issue. It certainly makes no sense to embed the same font repeatedly.

I too looked through Acrobat's settings (somewhat cursively) and couldn't find a quick solution. Guess I'll mosey over to Adobe's site and see if others have reported the issue on their forums.

Edit: Found this thread at Adobe's forums.

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6b855/0

Sounds backwards to set the embedding option to 0%, but can't hurt anything to try. It's late here, I'm going to give it a try tomorrow.

Hey, this makes Acrobat Pro essentially useless. I just wasted my money!

Heh! Well, that does depend on what you're making a PDF of. For documents that are nothing but text, Acrobat is certainly overkill. But if you need to create print quality PDF files with high resolution images, then it's a necessity. OS X's built in PDF generator always knocks embedded images down to highly compressed, low resolution JPEGs. You have no control over it.

Aha! And the note on Adobe's forum about TrueType fonts is exactly the issue. Did some more experimenting this morning to prove what happens when.

I once again started with some simple TrueType fonts with the text repeated about ten times in a Word document so each type face was also repeated. Note that this happens with any TrueType font. Both old 8 bit fonts and OpenType TrueType fonts.

As it did yesterday, the same fonts were embedded over and over no matter how I set things in the Distiller. From a 208 KB Word document, OS X would create 232 KB PSD file and Acrobat a 1 MB file.

So I started over using only PostScript fonts. Two Type 1 PostScript fonts and one PostScript OpenType font. From a 172 KB Word document, OS X produced a 180 KB file, but Acrobat's was only 100 KB. Success! Checking in Acrobat Pro, each font was indeed only embedded once. With the TrueType fonts, they were embedded, as before, for as many instances of a change in type face.

Now, you can clean the TrueType versions up, but it takes an extra step. A real nuisance if you have to do it to many documents. You can open the resulting PDF from the Distiller in Acrobat Pro and do a Save As. Choose "Adobe PDF Files, Optimized" and click on the Settings button. Click on the Fonts heading at the left and unembed all fonts. Then click one of each font face and click the retain button. Click OK and save your file. That took what was a 1 MB PDF file down to 140 KB.

Or save yourself a lot of monkeying around and use only PostScript fonts. 😉

Check you setting for Acrobat Pro. There should be options about image sizes, and whether to include fonts or assume the printer has them.

Try telling Adobe Pro not to include the fonts, then see if Preview works with the PDF.

As has already been suggested, your vector graphics are probably being rasterized. Without an actual file to inspect, all anyone can offer is speculation.